BioWare Addresses Mass Effect 3 Criticism At PAX East

During a ridiculously packed BioWare panel for Mass Effect 3 at PAX East, six BioWare members responded to the wealth of criticism on the still fantastic game. Producer Mike Gamble, Senior Combat Designer Corey Gaspur, Quality Assurance Associate Team Lead Reid Buckmaster, Senior Writer Patrick Weekes and John Dombrow, and Community Manager Chris Priestly (whew!) all addressed the controverseries concerning Tali's face, the game's paid day-one DLC, and of course the hooplah over the game's ending.

Though they didn't particularly comment on the day-one DLC, they showed the free DLC content that will be available, showing off a trailer for the upcoming Resurgence Pack for the multiplayer mode to be released in a couple of days on April 7th.

Arriving some time during the summer, Mass Effect: Extended Cut which will change the ending by adding a few deleted scenes, though the structure and concept of the ending itself will not be altered much. Gamble wanted to explain the purpose behind this DLC:

We want to make sure we actually answer some of the questions that we’re seeing... fill some of the unknowns and, in general, we really wanted to give players a sense of personalization with the ending. We want to make sure that when you see the ending of Mass Effect you now have the information in context and can be satisfied.

Tali's real face, which has been revealed to be just a stock photo with a darker blue tint, was also addressed:

In terms of what Tali’s face looked like and why it looked the way it was, we often use source art for many things within our game. In the case of Tali’s face, we wanted something to be photorealistic. We wanted the level of fidelity to be there. We wanted the color to be right.

Sorry, BioWare, but it would have been better to alter the image a bit more or to render a new model for Tali that's original. Making a facial model from a real-life face is fine, as Shepard's face looks dead-on with Mark Vanderloo's. But this is too much of a cop-out.

At any rate, Gamble is grateful that there are fans who care enough about the franchise to give feedback:

Any time we receive constructive criticism we always welcome it. There are always a few that are not as constructive as possible, but we honestly don’t let it make us jaded. We still understand that there’s a lot of valuable feedback to be provided. We still welcome it.